Working on icon colors and flicker.

Cinth has been complaining about the neon signs that are the main icon colors for some time now, and many others have also brought it up. Just haven’t gotten around to it yet, until today, since he kind of prompted me to do some more work with it.

Ultimately he wound up making a goodly selection of new things down in the bottom rows there (the topmost row is mine, the rest are his).

These are easily moddable, by the way, so technically Cinth made the “first mod,” although that’s dubious since it’s just part of the main game now since he’s directly helping create the game… but he wanted to note that, heh.

Anyway, the topmost row is actually after a whole lot of work on my end, working on completely new shaders today, too. So that row is a lot better than things were before.

That Stupid Flicker!

Problem is, we’re still getting an absolutely awful flicker at times with the icons in general. The problem overall is z-fighting because of floating point precision issues on your GPU at far distances despite us scaling these things up. The glow exacerbates that.

What I’m going to wind up doing is recoding these things so that they don’t exist in the same space, but instead so that they exist in a layered camera that uses fake distance, and uses no rotation whatsoever. By faking the distance, I can minimize chances for floating point errors, and by avoiding the rotation I avoid any form of rotation-based strangeness.

This will mean that I need to translate from the target point of the icon in world space into screen space, then back over to “other camera world space, with fake distance applied,” but that’s a pretty cheap calculation and I don’t have to do it every frame. In the end, it’s probably cheaper than some of the math that I have to do now in order to make them billboard, and it will solve the flicker.

Frustratingly, I have bigger fish to fry right now. So I’m not sure if I’ll get to that this week. But I wanted to let folks know I figured it out, at least.